What Are Adverse Childhood Experiences?

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Highly sensitive children can be blamed for reacting badly to a family's dysfunction.

But that is never the child's fault—it's the job of parents to keep kids safe from harm.

If you were scapegoated, realizing you weren't to blame can be life-changing.

The first time I learned about the concept of an “identified patient,” it immediately resonated with me. So many of my clients have had the experience of being the “problem” in their family. They were scapegoated, blamed, and gaslit for struggling with their mental health. Often a highly sensitive or neurodivergent child (or both), they felt the family’s turbulence deeply, unable to pretend everything was fine and ignore all the chaos.

The idea of an identified patient is used in family therapy, where sessions involve the whole family, not just the person (often a child or adolescent) who is struggling. It’s common in these sessions for other family members to say, “Well, they have all these problems, but we’re just fine.”

Blamed for Being “Too Sensitive”

If this resonates with you, it’s likely you were blamed by your family for being “difficult,” “too sensitive,” or “selfish,” because you often got upset as a child. I even hear these descriptions of babies who cried a lot, didn’t sleep through the night, or struggled with colic, as if a baby could somehow control their behavior to be easy or difficult.

It’s true that babies are especially sensitive to their parents’ moods, facial expressions, and tone of voice, so they can react strongly to, say, a depressed mother........

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